For a new liberty Book

A facile argument that attempts to borrow authority from Locke and the natural rights tradition.
Interestingly, what is wrong about this book is fairly easily summarized. On p.38, he quotes from one of Locke's treatises on government:

. . . every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to.

Now, what is interesting is not that he is quoting Locke (or the natural rights tradition, flawed as it is, more generally), or what he is quoting from Locke, but rather what Rothbard is omitting. Consider the full paragraph, which runs as follows:
Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
See what is left out? It is basically because of this omission that Rothbard can make his case at all (ignoring the fact that the rest of the book is filled to the brim with false dichotomies and other kinds of sloppy argumentation). Because most if not all of the rest of his argument rests on the twin assumptions that a. a society is just only if there exist private property rights, and b. these rights are necessarily absolute, which these omissions -- concerning the absolute nature of this status, and property rights as an organizing principle more generally -- are explicitly meant as checks against.